Rimini Street

Rimini Street, headquartered in Las Vegas, is a provider of independent enterprise software support services.

The fact that we now have a higher level conversation instead of a more product-oriented conversation is a dramatic difference.”

—Gala Lyne, VP Global Sales Effectiveness, Rimini Street

Highlights

Leveraged Corporate Visions’ cross-functional message development workshop, Create Value Messages, to create a differentiated market message and point of view

Packaged the message they developed in Create Value Messages into content to enable their reps to tell a differentiated, insights-driven story in the field

Trained their sales team on the Create Value Skills, helping reps make a bigger impact on first sales calls, articulate their differentiation, and convert more leads into pipeline

Challenge

When Gala Lyne, VP Global Sales Effectiveness at Rimini Street, joined the company in January 2016, the enterprise software support provider had a growth projection of 40 percent. That meant they were going to be hiring significantly, and ramping up a new team of salespeople to get them fluent on the company’s 12 products.

To hit its high growth projections, the company knew it needed to build a strong pipeline, but at the time, lead conversion was one of the company’s biggest challenges.

“We were getting only about two out of 10 first calls to move to proposal stage,” Lyne said. “That was a problem, because obviously it’s your pipeline that drives your ultimate revenue.”

So, to correct the pipeline problem, the company asked itself: What can we do differently? The answer, according to Lyne, was looking to sales skills training to empower their reps with a combination of different messaging, content and delivery skills.

“We were like every company out there that had a 60 to 100 page corporate deck reps could pull from,” Lyne said. “But in reality it wasn’t working.”

As the company started to grow and bring in new reps, the sales content they had to guide their conversations wasn’t resonating. Lyne said they had to adapt the content and messaging to give them more anchors and tools to get the company’s message across. But even then, salespeople were still delivering product presentations more than customer conversations,

“The presentation style just didn’t leave a lot of good discovery,” Lyne said.

Lyne says investing in Corporate Visions’ Conversation System has dramatically changed the way Rimini Street approaches its customers. And one of the best parts: the approach has been enthusiastically embraced by the executive team.

“When we found [Create Value Skills] and Corporate Visions, it was a perfect fit for what we needed, because it took us back to the coffee talk days of sitting across [from customers] and learning,” she said. “A big shift for us is leading with insights, and not just the 20 discovery questions, which annoys every customer.”

Rimini Street executed Create Value Messages before rolling out Create Value Skills training to their sales team. A cross-functional team participated in the message development workshop. That team included sales leaders, marketing executives, the president of the organization, as well as professionals on the technical side.

After the cross-functional team developed their differentiated message and point of view, the next phase of implementation focused on rolling out Create Value Skills to the sales team, and making sure Rimini Street’s reps were prepared to tell their story in a compelling way in front of prospects and customers. As the process unfolded, Lyne said the company continued finding creative ways to foster message consistency across their sales and marketing teams.

“It wasn’t until probably two to three weeks into the planning phase [for Create Value Skills] that we realized that we’re going to miss the mark if we don’t have marketing engaged [in Create Value Skills training],” Lyne said. “So we rolled in some additional classes for marketing and our sales development team and tailored them to those two teams, so they were part of that process.”

She added: “The fact that we now have a higher level conversation instead of a more product-oriented conversation is a dramatic difference.”